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Live
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16
February 2003
Something
wrong with this picture?
How much lower can
this bastard stoop?
The increasingly creepy
Richard Neville has posted this
picture - supposedly of the bombing of the Baghdad suburb of Shua’le
- with the caption "9,500 Iraqi civilians killed; John Howard has
'no regrets'":
Richard used these
awful images to accompany some emotive blubber:
The Pentagon
maintained that the blast must have been caused by Iraqi anti aircraft
fire, while the locals said they saw an American plane overhead and
a sliver of silver. Fisk managed to get his hands on a smoldering fragment
of the bomb, which displayed a 12 digit serial number, as well as another
number, ending 96214. Fisk published these codes in his UK newspaper,
The Independent, available Online. Hours later, the citizens of the
net had sourced this missile to a plant in McKinney, Texas.
[...]
This plant is
owned by the one of the world’s biggest arms suppliers, and a favourite
of own Defence Force, Raytheon.
[...]
With another
click of the mouse, I discovered that one week after the superior solution
was dished out to the people of Shuale, the then chairman & CEO
of Raytheon, Daniel P Burnham was actually in Canberra, Australia, where
he addressed the National Press Club.
[...]
As far as I can
ascertain, during the question time, not one member the Press Club audience
was discourteous enough to ask the Chairman of Raytheon how he felt
about the accuracy of missile 96214.
A pity noone has yet
asked Richard about the accuracy of the picture he used with this story.
I remembered seeing
this picture before: the child on the left is an Israeli, who
was badly injured when some Palestinian scumbag blew
up a bus in Jerusalem. One of a long line of similar atrocities Richard
has little interest in, except where the pics of Jewish victims of Islamic
terror can be used as fake pictures of American terror.
What was that about
American propaganda?
link
More........... Richard Neville discovers "the internet"
Other than faked-up
photo montages, Dick gives us another
unhinged essay, encompassing the evils of inhuman telephony services,
and Richard finally becoming aware of the existence of this thing called
The Internet:
Some time later
my wife returned from the journey a changed woman, realising that her
identity was no longer confined to a single location … or nation,
or category. She had become postmodern woman. Her writings, her name,
her reputation, she realised, all floated around in cyberspace, unbounded.
Her sense of self had suddenly become globalised. She was now a citizen
of the net.
And all us of
here tonight, are we too citizens of the net? Sure we are. But what
kind of citizens? Are we passive… and inert, part of a vast sleepwalking
target market, or are we active, globalised and engaged?
Most of us are sane
people with a PC and a telephone line.
Richard goes on to
tell us why this internet thing is really, really important, by linking
it with the stinky "we hate capitalism and democracy"-fest in
Bombay.
The reason I
flew off to Bombay at short notice and at some cost, was to attend what
turned out to be one of the most amazing events of my life. It was like
a world music Woodstock without the mud, and the Nimbin Aquarius Festival
without the pot.
In other words, being
surrounded by ugly hippies without loud music or pot to ease the pain.
Sweet Jesus.
This vast hothouse
of dissent & social justice dreaming hit the headlines in the Times
of India, and sparked debates on Asian TV. Let’s conduct a little
test. How many of you here have ever heard of the World Social Forum?
Let’s see a show of hands. (In an audience of 400, about a dozen
hands are raised.)
An odd question to
ask his audience, seeing as he can't stop talking about it.
How many of you
have heard of another event , which took place at the same time - the
World Economic Forum at Davos? (A 90% show of hands).
Er, I hadn't actually.
Even though this
event attracts less of a crowd and fewer original thinkers & social
reformers...
(They were people
with jobs then)
....your raised
hands are a sign of the times. It confirms the triumph of economic man,
homo economistus, who now stands proud on top of the rubble of a world
at war, a world reeling from social injustice and one in the throes
of an eco calamity.
A world with now fewer
tyrants, less poverty, a non-greenhouse climate and more wealth than at
any time in history. Richard liked it better when the Soviets were killing
everyone with their peaceful, non-corrupt culture of conquest.
In the West,
the World Economic Forum is front page news, day after day, while the
World Social Forum is barely a footnote.
Front page
news?
Is this Australia
in the 21st century - so multicultural in the food halls, so myopic
in its global vision?
Somone can't tell
the difference between knowing something is there, and actually
caring about it.
Out in the big
wide world, there’s actually something shifting in the wind, a
new mood pushing at the edge of our awareness. What could it be?
My guess is, we can
smell all the Forum-goers coming home from Bombay. Why couldn't you have
stayed there if you were so damned happy?
Richard lets us know
how ignorant and stupid we all are, and why we really need this internet
thing:
So how come the
global sample of Social Forum awareness is so much out of kilter with
the awareness of it in this group? A minute ago you were all riding
high, imaging yourself to be worldly wise & informed citizens served
well by your media – but no – a huge event of global significance
passed you by, glued as you are to the information systems controlled
by homo economistus, our non diverse and highly homogenised corporate
media.
Or maybe, just
maybe, few of us care about a bunch of brain-dead, whinging dorks
who want us all to live in the forest and make love to ferns.
Dear Richard, get
this through you fucking head, once and for all:
We have not been deprived
of your wonderful societal vision through censorship, or the Nazi Howard
government, or the Americans, or McDonalds, or the nasty capitalist media.
There is no vicious
cabal trying to squish your dissent. We are not brainwashed.
We know where to look
for the lunacy and lies you and your deranged ilk are peddling. We can
go read Indymedia, we can buy John Pilger's books, we can read Michael
Moore, we can read your website. And that Internet thing you've just discovered
which will lead to our intellectual awakening? We've been using it for
a decade.
WE
KNOW ABOUT YOUR IDEAS, WE JUST HAPPEN TO THINK YOU'RE AN IDIOT.
Get it?
link
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